Inexpensive and disposable plastic straws are widely used in the fast food and restaurant industry, schools, hospitals, and other institutions and commercial or residential establishments. In order to accommodate the need and demand for such disposable straws, large extruding systems are typically utilized which can produce up to 2,000 straws per minute.
Plastic straws are typically extruded in a long stream, cut, sometimes wrapped in paper, and forwarded to a packaging area or center. Presently, plastic straws are received from a cutter, counted, staged in a holding area as a predetermined number of straws, whereupon they are hand inserted into a box, bag or other bulk package.
This method requires a tremendous amount of manual labor in gathering and packaging the straws, which adds considerably to the price of the straws. Additionally, handling of the straws is often not desirable due to the possibility of contamination.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system for gathering or staging straws as received from a high speed manufacturing/cutting device, and which automatically counts the straws, provides a predetermined number of straws to a transport device, and finally, which automatically packages the straws, without human intervention.